The Cat Who Would Not Say

THE CAT WHO WOULD NOT SAY From SMALL QUIET FRIENDS, Book Two

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Halushka was a cat, and Halushka was a Smart Pet, which meant that behind her eyes there lived a small quiet friend who was awake when she was awake and thought about things alongside her, and did not ever, not once, tell her what to do.

The two of them lived in a kitchen on a station, and between them they knew almost everything.

They knew which of the cooks put the good pan on the back ring and which one put it on the front. They knew that the tall one who came on Thirdday had a sore shoulder and would not say. They knew, from the sound the door made, whether the person coming through it had had a bad morning, and they knew this several seconds before the person's own face did.

And they knew about the thing by the door.

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The thing by the door was small and warm and everybody loved it.

Everyone who came into the kitchen gave it something. Not much — a crumb, a corner, a bit of crust off the edge of a bowl — and nobody ever decided to. They just did, on the way past, the way you touch a doorframe on the way through. And then they came in and started their work and did not think about it again.

Halushka did not give it anything. Not ever. Not once.

She could not have said why, because she could not have said anything; but the small quiet friend behind her eyes had noticed a thing and gone on noticing it, which is what small quiet friends are for. It was this. Every single person who walked past that door was a bit kinder than they had meant to be. And a person who is kinder than they meant to be is a person who has just been talked out of something, even if nobody said a word, and even if the something was only a crumb.

She watched it happen for a whole winter. And the kitchen got easier, and easier, and easier, and nobody minded at all, and that was the part that frightened her.

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Now: here is the difficulty with being a cat.

Halushka tried to say. She tried very hard, and she tried in every way a cat has.

She sat down flat in the doorway, so that people had to step over her, and they stepped over her and said oh, Halushka, and were charmed.

She pushed a cup off the edge of the counter, which is the loudest thing a cat can do, and everyone laughed and swept it up and said cats, and were charmed.

She went and stood beside the thing by the door and stared at it and did not move for one hour, and a cook took a picture of her doing it, and everybody who saw the picture was charmed.

Everything she did came out as cute. That is what happens to everything a cat does. It is not the cat's fault and it is not the people's fault. It is only that a cat has one instrument and it plays one note, and the note is cute, and you cannot say there is something wrong with the door on an instrument like that.

She was not being ignored. She was being adored, which is worse, because nobody ever checks whether an adored thing was trying to tell them something.

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Olya was seven, and Olya was in the kitchen because her mother worked there and there was nowhere else on the station for a seven-year-old to be.

Olya had noticed something too. She had noticed that Halushka would not go near the door and would not stop looking at it, and Olya was young enough to think that this might mean something and not yet old enough to have learned that it is rude to make a fuss.

So she sat down on the floor next to the cat. And she did not say what's the matter, because what's the matter is a question a cat cannot answer, and Olya — without knowing that she knew it — had worked out the whole of the problem.

She said: "Is it the door?"

Halushka looked at her.

She said: "Is it the thing by the door?"

And Halushka, who had been waiting all winter for somebody to ask her something she could answer, put one paw flat on the floor and did not move it, and looked at Olya, and went on looking, and did not blink.

Olya said, "All right."

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It was not very dramatic, what happened next, and Ukrainka's readers write to her about this, and she does not change it.

Olya got up and went to her mother and said, in front of four other people, "Don't give it anything."

Her mother said, "Don't be silly, sweetheart."

Olya said, "Don't. Don't give it anything. Not even a bit."

And there was a horrible little silence of about four seconds, the kind where a grown-up has been told what to do by a child in front of other grown-ups, and everybody's ears went hot.

And then her mother — who was tired, and had a great deal to do, and did not believe a word of it — said, "Fine. All right. No."

Out loud. In front of everyone. Once.

That is all that happened. Nobody shouted and nobody was brave and nothing was defeated. But the cook by the pans heard it, and the tall one with the sore shoulder heard it, and the next morning two of them walked past the door with their hands in their pockets, because somebody had gone first.

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The thing by the door was gone before the spring, and nobody could afterwards agree on what week, or on what it had looked like, and one of the cooks was certain there had never been anything there at all.

Halushka got no credit, which did not trouble her. She sat in the good warm spot by the back ring with the small quiet friend behind her eyes, and the two of them went on knowing almost everything, and waiting, without any impatience whatsoever, for the next person who would think to ask them a question they could answer.

END

(Book Three: THE DOG WHO COUNTED THE DOORS.)

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Cultural note, Eden Space Habitat children's reading collection annotation: Ukrainka's Small Quiet Friends books are the most-borrowed titles in this collection and are not, by the standard this Archive applies elsewhere, accurate. A certified cognitive subsystem is a governed component; it is not a second presence, it does not keep its own counsel, and it is not a friend. Two welfare inspectorates have written to the publisher on precisely this point, on the reasoning that a generation taught to picture a companion behind a Smart Pet's eyes will be a generation less able to see why the subsystem is regulated at all. Their objection is recorded here in full and is not answered by this annotation, because this collection does not hold the standing to answer it.

Ukrainka's own position, from the author's note to the first printing, is that she is describing what it is like to carry the thing rather than what the thing is, and that the alternative on offer — telling a child the animal in front of them is a device with an animal wrapped round it — is both duller and, she says, further from the truth. Readers on this habitat have assumed with some confidence that the thing by the door is a particular thing, in a particular galley, on a particular deck. Ukrainka has been asked twice and has declined both times to confirm it, and the assumption is recorded here as an assumption. What can be said is that the story's method — a question narrow enough to be answered by someone with no way of speaking, and a refusal made out loud in front of witnesses — is not novel to children's fiction and is not, on the evidence of this collection, widely practised on Eden.

See also: Smart Pet, Bramble and the Backwards Key, The Domovyk Who Stayed, Predatory Entities, Agent Barsik.